Does God exist

The debate "Does God exist" was started by
Tebogo_tsweu on
April 5, 2016, 11:37 am.
42 people are on the agree side of this discussion, while 26 people are on the disagree side.
That might be enough to see the common perception.
It looks like most of the people in this community are on the agreeing side of this statement.

Before you read my argument I respect all walks of life, but I'm nowhere near a theist or even an atheist, I'm a deist.
The bible and the story of Noah's Arc is almost like a fable( a fictional story) with a moral lesson for theists. Ninety-nine percent of the biblical stories follow this same procedure. So to argue that the arc was filled with animals and sailed over rainfall is misleading and not accurate. If one is going to argue over the existence of a supreme being who moved the universe, then argue with full blown scientific and philosophical truths. Fundementalism (the belief that bible stories happened accurately in history) is almost gone in all revealed religions.

This article is literally the just one guys opinion. Jake Herbert, a creation scientist (whatever that's supposed to be) is the only one to think these metal nodules are somehow related to a global flood.

That hardly constitutes proof. Especially when the scientific community is agreed that there was no global flood.

Let's just look at the flood for a minute. There is no evidence that the earth has enough water to cover the entire earth the way the Bible describes it. You would have to have water levels up to about 30k feet above sea level today (everest is over 29k feet). You would have to deal with the fact that the entire remaining biological population was supposed to have survived above 26k feet (the death zone). We'd have to square the genetic variability problem, there is no evidence of genetic bottlenecks, there is no evidence of a rapid "draining". There is no way we would have any reefs if the flood occurred, the salinity changes to the oceans would have killed all the fish.... Do I need to go on?

The boat named the Wyoming pretty much proved that wooden boats of that size are not sea worthy.... Especially in oceans without a landmass to break up waves and currents....an ocean like that would have been extremely violent.

Which one are you talking about? There have been several "discoveries" of Noah's ark. The most famous is Durupinar, which has been debunked by many, many people, including creationists. If you mean a different one, let me know and I can research it.

Noahs ark is not proven. Please show me the data that proves noah's ark. Regional floods did happen around the time described, but none were so big as to be considered global. There is also no evidence of a man named Noah, and there is scientific proof that there was no genetic bottle neck anywhere around the time of Noah.

So we've arrived at the circular reasoning part of the debate.....you need secular sources (I.e. Roman census data or archeological evidence to verify Jesus) you can't use scripture to justify scripture...

There is no historical evidence of a man named Jesus of Nazareth. His story, like many of the stories in the Bible, is likely a retelling of another Mesopotamien myth or the combination of a few. Just like noah's flood etc...

Likely candidates are of course "The epic of Gilgamesh", "Horus", "mithra", "Krishna", and even "Buddha".

All of these stories preceded the story of Jesus Christus and all have similar content to the Christian myths. The epic of Gilgamesh is seems to be the most influential book story for the Christian story...

I know I exist. if I claim to be God is that proof of God's existence? Jesus probably existed (you can't definitely prove he did). but how does that prove that the things he said were true. there have been thousands if not millions of false prophets and saviors. just because he is the most popular one does not mean what he said was true.

You're right, there is no way to prove or disprove God outright. You can disprove scripture. However, you will find very few people who will not try and weasel out of this type of debate.

That's where the fun lies in debating the concepts of religion. It's a cat and mouse game to me. The goal isn't to disprove that God exists or that a particular religion is wrong. That kind of proof will never exist. The only thing you can hope for is for the opposition to make contradictory statements, or you get them into a loop (x therefore God, God therefore x) - - - >the last one is my usual goal since it pretty much demonstrates the end of the line for a cohesive argument.

At this point, religious debates are a cat and mouse game. If you do this often enough you can predict the usual responses and word your queries in such a way as to place traps should they answer certain points in a certain way (socratic method). It's pretty easy since most of the rebuttals by apologists are fairly uniform.

I've actually been contemplating on making a new account here so I can jump in and argue the apologist position since most of the apologists here use rather poor arguments (seems like a lot of people here like the William Craig arguments).

If you're debating someone like Alex, who is a fairly soft apologist this task gets harder. Most often soft apologists will acknowledge certain scientific facts which are indisputable (I.e. Evolution as a method of speciation, the big bang). They will however try and insert God into the gaps of those theories (I.e. Abiogenesis, the cause of the big bang). Even this position is getting harder and harder to defend however. As we fill the gaps of these theories, we can demonstrate natural processes which offer alternative explanations to the origin of the universe and of life. None of them are robust enough to be considered a scientific theory of abiogenesis or the pre-big bang conditions, however they are robust enough to present a valid hypothetical alternative to supernatural entities.

Since God is also just a hypothetical explanation of natural phenomena, it is perfectly fair to introduce scientific hypothesis as a counter argument.

The last thing you can do is to show inconsistencies in a belief system. With the abrahamic faiths this can be done by demonstrating that Adam and Eve couldn't have existed (that's a fairly easy task). This is because Adam and Eve form the basis of sin and salvation in the abrahamic faiths.

what I find makes it impossible to debate the existence of God is the fact that every proof has to have a proof. For example, you can't say that the evolution is true because Charles Darwin said so, you have to prove what Charles Darwin said was true. By this logic for a fact to be proven, it must be proved in a chain that ends with a fact that must be definitely true without any way of disputing it. No such fact exists, so technically nothing can be proven.

Creating existence is comparable to creating logic. If a+b=c, then it must be provable by what exists. On the other hand, to make it so that a+b=c, there needs to be a way to have this occur, and while the result is how it is now, we cannot go backwards as proof that it is how it would have been. I am basically saying that using logic on an observation wouldn't change, but changing an observation would change the logic. Therefore, if something can't come from nothing, then either we must decide that something is currently coming or has from nothing in an unobservable way or that something that defies existence made it so, be it mechanism of the universe, will of the omnipotent, or otherwise. But considering the illogical, even the illogical or impossible a proposed logic must also follow with it, and if it isn't impossible, then the illogical's logic must follow in suit.

Therefore, if God is omnipotent, then he created logic, and exists outside of it. We already have considered the change in things by observation, and that certain perspectives are created by heuristics, and there are theories that even the human species acts as a collective super organism. To say God is illogical, yeah, that is the premise of God because it is necessary for God to be illogical. If God were logical, God would be limited and therefore not God. But illogic is often used to describe the misunderstood, like a tainted experiment. Therefore, logical and illogical are observations, and not properties when it comes to God. Capable, yet unreasonable.

It's almost like stating the obvious, saying that God is illogical, but that doesn't fall on either side of the argument.

No person on the earth in the universe can explain how all species came to life, they can tell you what species are fromed , combined, created from, but not tell you how we are alive!!! use logic, rationality think